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A brief history of covetousness

Is the beach just a piece of land which got lucky due to its proximity to that great big ocean, did the ocean gift it all this sand which makes it beautiful at some lucky date in the past, or did the sand pile up, one day at a time, grain upon grain, a tiny everyday gift and before you knew it, the beach got fundamentally altered, became something it wasn’t before the ocean met it, before it got used to the tides washing it clean and leaving it soaked every day according to schedule. Before you knew it, the beach was sand, just sand, it’s identity irreversibly linked to the ocean, it’s most visible trait all a silent gift, all intertwined in the land and the ocean, you couldn’t say where one started and the other ended, you just couldn’t however hard you tried.

And when the tide wouldn’t come, when the sand would be carried away back where it belonged, a realization would strike that maybe it wasn’t a gift, it was a loan whenever the ocean came to meet it which it took back when it left, it had become complacent in confusing a loan with a gift.

For a few days, it would remain salty, moist, holding on to that taste in every pore. Then, with the sun beating down, the wetness would slowly turn into just a memory, though you only had to dig in a shovel to find what you were looking for, something irretrievably a part of itself but hidden from the sea itself, a brazen hiding of its neediness in plain sight .

But, when you get down to the brass tacks, if there’s no tide, just what is the beach without an ocean?